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Comment by anonymous908213

7 hours ago

Unicode is distinct from, and completely unrelated to, TrueType. Unicode does not require a virtual machine to interpret. You can simply express languages and their variations with Unicode + bitmap fonts.

Unless you want ligatures.

  • Do you really believe the only way to implement ligatures is with a virtual machine? Dumb and dirty psuedocode written in 5 seconds of thinking about it but come on, this is not that complicated.

      for each character in text
        characterToPrint = Parse(character)
        if character is LigatureStartCandidate
          characterToPrint = LookAheadForNextLigatureCandidateAndResolve(character)
        Print(characterToPrint)

    • And you've now gotten 92% of the way there. Iterate a few dozen more times to get up to 97%, 98%, 99%, etc., and eventually you'll have rewritten OpenType.

      2 replies →